In keeping with this week’s “Internet Packrat” theme, let’s look at the many ways to save web pages and their content for future viewing. We’ll examine methods available in Apple’s Safari web browser, but other browsers offer similar ways to “skin the cat”.

The most common method of saving a web page for future reference is, of course, to bookmark it. There are two problems with bookmarking, however. One, you have to be online to go back to the page. Not that big a deal on your home desktop computer, but if you’re on the road with a notebook computer and no internet connection, a bookmark does you little good.

Two, if the content on the page changed since you bookmarked it and the page isn’t archived somewhere, the information on the page may be lost to you. So, how can you save a web page so that wherever you are, and whenever you want to, you can view it exactly as you saw it the first time?

You could do the oh-so-20th-century thing and print it on paper. Ugh. Grossly inefficient. Let’s move on.

As any good Mac user knows, anything you can print in OS X you can “print” as a PDF. Simply wait until the web page is completely loaded in Safari (or you won’t see a “Print” command in the File menu), select Print, then click the PDF button and select “Print as PDF”. The resulting PDF file captures all the text and images on the web page, but none of the HTML links.

Be sure to give it a name descriptive of the page’s contents, and save it to somewhere you can find it later. However, you can always use Mac OS X’s Spotlight search feature to easily find it if need be, as all the text is indexed by Spotlight as soon as the PDF file is created.

Safari also offers the ability to save a web page as a “Web Archive”. A Web Archive file contains not only the text on the page, but the HTML links and images as well, so that if you’re offline and open a Web Archive you’ll see pretty much what was on the page when you saved it.

If you use Apple’s Mail program as well as Safari, you can easily email an entire web page to someone, simply by selecting “Mail Contents of This Page” from the “File” menu.